Here’s what’s been keeping me busy lately:

8 May 2020: for the 17th time we will have the dustiest scientific session of the European Gesociences Union. This year, for the first time, the session will be fully online. Please follow this link to find more info on the session.

May 2020: our dusty special volume in The Holocene is out! This special is the result of the PAGES-DICE workshop organised by François de Vleeschouwer and Fabrice Lambert in Las Cruses, Chile, in January 2018.

April 2020: whoop whoop, Laura’s paper in L&O is published! The message of this paper is that the Amazon River outflow has a large potenital for atmospheric CO2 sequestration, just like Saharan dust!

March 2020Now that we can analyse the shape of aeolian particles, we should be able to quantify the relationship between wind strength and aeolian deposits, based on their particle size, particle shape and composition. Here I am testing a prototype sediment collector on the southern sandy part of the island Texel

March 2020Whoop whoop, Michèlle’s paper on trans-Atlantic dust fluxes has appeared in Geophysical Research Letters!

February 2020FEST stands for Friday Earth Sciences Talk at the faculty of Earth Sciences of Utrecht University and I was invited to spend some words on my favourite topic: dust!

January 2020The year started very windy so that the new natural coastal defence just north of NIOZ was very mobile....

January 2020The VU earth sciences students society GEOVUSIE organises a seminar every now and then and this time I was allowed to spend some words on my favourite subject: dust!

November 2019Expedition DUST2019 was organised to service the dust-collecting buoys Carmen and Laura offshore NW Africa onboard RV Pelagia. Please click here to read the blog on the NIOZ site

November 2019The MSc course Marine Geology & Paleoclimatology that Frank Peeters and I are teaching at VU kicks off at NIOZ, and this year’s students were extremely lucky to find our flag ship RV Pelagia to be home; we obviously visited her instead of taking class!

October 2019Here you see a set-up that I made to illustrate aeolian processes for the NIOZ open day

October 2019The organisation of inDUST invited me to come talk about trans-Atlantic dust studies during their general assembly in Porto, Portugal.

September 2019Maarten Prins and I organised a one-day Tour de Texel on the geologic history of the island for the VU-Amsterdam earth-science student association GeoVUsie

September 2019Some footage was shot for a documentary on my dusty work

July 2019The general assembly of INQUA (International Union for Quaternary Research) in Dublin offered a platform for many scientific disciplines focussing on human and climate history during the past 2.6 Myrs.

July 2019For S.E.A. I also teamed up with Jan van den Berg and Hannie van den Bergh who created a podcast-sandy-walk in the Texel dunes, featuring me as a curious scientist who helps solve a crime based on the journey that sand particles can make....

June 2019For S.E.A. (Science Encounters Art or Scientists Encounter Artists) I teamed up with Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen who made an exhibition called Pareidolia in which face-recognition software analyses sand particles to see if faces can be seen in them (Yes: they can!)

May 2019The paper by Marijke de Bar was published in the open-access journal Biogeosciences. Marijke used the Transatlantic sediment traps to validate her diol-proxy for SSTs.

Summer 2019A piece on my studies after the role of desert dust in the earth’s climate in the local Texel newspaper.

May 2019Our paper on an “old” ODP core was published in Geophysical Research Letters despite attempts to block and even discredit our work!

23 April 2019Saharan dust reached northern Europe and I wrote a little blog about it on the NIOZ dust website.

April 2019The collaboration with Patrick De Deckker resulted in yet another paper on southern-hemisphere climates and in this particular one we focus on the geological remnants that we found on the pre-last glacial in the Australasian region.

6 March 2019With a delegation of NIOZ I travelled to Bremerhaven to formalize collaboration between several German and Dutch research institutes including NIOZ, AWI, and MARUM, witnessed by the Dutch King and Queen.

January 2019The long lasting and very fruitful collaboration with Patrick De Deckker (ANU, Canberra, Australia) has resulted in yet another paper:”Land-sea correlation in the Australian region”, which is part two in a series of two papers.

December 2018Our paper on giant dust particles made it into the open-access version of the journal Science! (link to paper)

7 December 2018Michèlle successfully defends her PhD thesis entitled Saharan dust from a marine perspective: transport and deposition along a transect in the Atlantic Ocean and may also proudly call herself a Phd from now on.

16 October 2018Laura successfully defends her PhD thesis entitled Saharan dust deposition in the equatorial North Atlantic Ocean and its impact on particle export fluxes and may proudly call herself a PhD from now on.

September 2018Michèlle publishes her 2nd dusty paper in the journal Aeolian Research

August 2018RV Pelagia in the harbour of Catania, Sicily, Italy, ready to sail for expedition 64PE443 (blog on NIOZ website)

July 2018The poster of my dusty seminar at the University of Toulouse, where I visited Fran;cois de Vleeschouwer

On top of Dune de Pilat: the present ICAR president Frank Eckhardt (L) and past president Adrian Chappell, with the president-elect

June 2018: the 10th International Conference on Aeolian Research (ICAR X) where Martina Klose and I convened the session “Dust dynamics and processes: emission, dispersal and deposition”

June 2018A piece in the Texelse Courant on the kick-off of project S.E.A.: Science Encounters Art, in which Jan van den Berg and me are developing a project for the art month Lange juni 2019

May 2018The Groene Amsterdammer wrote a piece on geo-engineering for which they also asked my input (in Dutch)

May 2018Helga’s first dusty paper is out! We present new data on the ballasting potential of Saharan dust

January 2018Catarina, Laura and me (R2L) at the biological station of the University of Chile in Las Cruces where the PAGES-DICE workshop on dust was organised (#lovemyjob)

January 2018During the NICO expedition, leg 2 (Gran Canaria - Curaçao) on board RV Pelagia, dust was sampled, and plenty of it! In this animated gif you can see several outbreaks of Saharan dust.

December 2017Laura Schreuder published her first study on the biomarkers in Saharan dust in Organic Geochemistry. Cheers Laura, here’s to many more dusty papers!

Ute Merkel and me organised the 4th German “dust day” (Staubtag) at the MARUM in Bremen on 22 November 2017

October 2017Catarinas first dusty paper is out: accepted as full paper in Biogeochemistry

August 2017:Cruise M140 on board FS Meteor took us from Cape Verde to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and gave us the opportunity to visit and service the sampling of Saharan dust with both marine sediment traps and dust-collecting buoys. See the NIOZ website for a blog

July 2017The end-member approach proved its value once more; with it we managed to tease apart not only aeolian dust from fluvial mud but also turbidites that have their own grain-size signature!You can read all about it in the paper by Anne Bernhardt and colleagues that came out this week in EPSL.

June 2017A first for Catarina: her first dusty paper came out as a discussion paper in the EGU open-access journal Biogeochemistry! Cheers Catarina, here’s to many more!

June 2017A first for Laura: her first paper came out in the EGU open-access journal Atmospheric Chemistry & Physics! Cheers Laura, here’s to many more!

May 2017Carmen successfully defended her PhD thesis at the MARUM, Bremen, Germany, on 2 May. Congratulations DOCTOR Friese!! Here she is proudly wearing her personalized gown and Dr’s hat.

April 2017During this year’s EGU meeting Peter Knippertz, Jo Nield, Tobias Lauer, and me organised a PICO session on dust, which was a great success!! Here you see colleagues lining up for their 2 minutes of fame in the 2-minute madness in which they pitched their presentation. Next year we’ll organise the session again and then celebrate its 15th anniversary during EGU2018.

March 2017Jiawang Lu’s paper was published in Quaternary Science Reviews.

March 2017The joint committee on Science and Technology of South Africa and the Netherlands met in The Hague to explore ideas and challenges on potential collaboration

February 2017Dust-collecting buoy Carmen had escaped last summer and we went back to her original position off Cape Blanc to re-deploy her. She’s now happily collecting Saharan dust again and we’ll harvest the samples during upcoming cruise M140 in August this year.

October 2016The Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science granted me a fellowship to come to Japan and with Dr Kana Nagashima and Prof Masafumi Murayama on ODP cores from the continental slope offshore NW Australia. This photo was taken in Kamakura.

August 2016Oops, she did it again.... Buoy Carmen was cut loose from her anchor off Cape Blanc. This time the FS Meteor with chief scientist Marcus Dengler came to the rescue and picked her up.

June 2016Lange Juni, a cultural and art festival on the island, introduced the term âScience-theaterâ for which we invited Jan van den Berg to come play his piece Oase about desert sand.

May 2016Kenniscafé Amsterdam organised an interactive evening about the sea and invited me to come and talk about dust.

Next to a few radio items, Gemma Venhuizen also wrote a really nice piece in the national newspaper NRC Handelsblad.

April 2016During cruise JC134 we had another journalist with us: Gemma Venhuizen. She made a few nice radio items, which you find here.

November 2015The ITS Academy wanted to learn about the state-of-the-art of marine research and organised an afternoon of talks and practicial lab work at the VU Amsterdam. My intention was to get to know potential teachers that would join our next cruise: JC134 onboard RRS James Cook in spring 2016

August 2015It was decided to present all this dusty knowledge in a series of online lectures, which you can attend here

December 2014In preparation for our 2015 DUSTTRAFFIC cruise onboard RV Pelagia, some pupils of the Texel highschool OSG De Hogeberg learned all about the environmental impacts of dust deposition while decorating styrofoam cups that we were going to lower to 5000m. They had to guess what would happen to the cups....

Summer 2014The Dutch national newspaper De Volkskrant selected 12 lines of scientific research they were going to report on for an extended period: here is one of their nice pieces on our dusty research.

May 2014Publishing our scientific results in scientific journals does not compare with being allowed to publish in the popular-science magazine KIJK. Being allowed to give a talk about my dusty work during a KIJK-live event is a dream come true!

January 2014The Natuurstruners came to visit again! This time we did some really COOL experiments with (dry) ice.

Summer 2013: Journalist Ronald Veldhuizen joined our cruise DUSTTRAFFIC II and wrote quite a lot of nice pieces about it! Here is one of those articles he wrote for the website: Wetenschap24

August 2013The MARUM-NIOZ dust buoy that was deployed at the long-term sediment-trap mooring station offshore Cape Blanc, Mauritania had escaped! It turned out she had been cut loose and drifting south. Fortunately, our colleagues from the Cape Verde Fisheries and Marine Research Institute INDP in Mindelo, Sao Vicente were willing and able to pick her up from onboard their RV Islandia

March 2013The fellows of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences invited me to present my latest findings on transatlantic Saharan dust

January 2013The IVN (Nature association) at Texel invited me to give a seminar about my work.

November 2012Together with Michèlle I gave a seminar for Geo-VUsie students on the transatlantic crossing we did onboard FS Meteor

May 2012Whoop whoop! Both ERC and NWO (Dutch national NSF) are willing to fund my plans for a transatlantic study of Saharan dust!

March 201218 Texelse Natuurstruners came to visit NIOZ to learn all about (not only sea-) water.

February 2011The public lecture on dust in Science Café Deventer was great fun!Good to see how many people are actually interested in science; the house was full! ....or maybe it was the band that was playing after my talk.....?

March 2010After the Beagle episode on the potential of dust fertilisation I participated in a live interactive discussion in the VPRO tv studios.